Homeless Must Be Defined In Order To Be Counted

April 01, 2001|By PATTI ROSENBERG Daily Press

No one really knows how many people are homeless in the U.S. or Virginia. By their very nature, homeless people are transient and therefore hard to count. Estimates of homelessness tend to be based on the number of people asking for a bed in a shelter.

According to the National Coalition for the Homeless: almost 25,000 people in Virginia sought space in state and federally funded shelters during fiscal year 2000. Another 35,000 were denied shelter because of a lack of bed space.

The coalition notes that those numbers are probably more meaningful for urban areas than for rural areas where there are few shelters. "People experiencing homelessness in these areas are less likely to live on the street or in a shelter, and more likely to live with relatives in overcrowded or substandard housing," the coalition says.

It says this group, "often referred to as 'the unsheltered' or 'hidden' homeless, frequently stay in automobiles, camp grounds, or other places that researchers cannot effectively search."

Other than a battered women's shelter, there is no emergency shelter for homeless people in Williamsburg, James City or York.

Various organizations -- the Salvation Army, United Way, the American Red Cross, city and county social services, local churches -- try to help meet the needs of the homeless by paying for them to stay in motels for short periods of time, getting them into rehabilitation or transitional housing programs and giving them food and clothing.

While leaders of those organizations track how many people their programs have served, they do not attempt to determine the overall number of homeless people in the area. Based on their experiences, their estimates of the number of homeless people here were all over the map.

Williamsburg City Manager Jack Tuttle said he believed the city generally had maybe 10 to 20 at any given time. Sister Berenice Eltz, who is in charge of the social ministry at St. Bede Catholic Church, projected a figure more than 100 times higher, based on a broader definition of homelessness and a larger area.

St. Bede assisted 2,973 people -- most of them in Williamsburg, James City and York -- with food, shelter, medicine, heating bills or other emergency needs. She believes 75 percent of them -- more than 2,200 people - - fit the definition of homeless in that they don't have reliable housing, although they may have a roof over their heads at times.